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Conventions and Emerging Standards

More than Pretty Pictures of the Past: an American Perspective on Virtual Heritage

by Donald H. Sanders

ABSTRACT
We have seen enormous growth, over the years, in the ways in which 3D computer technologies have been applied to the goals and problems of cultural heritage interpretation, documentation, and preservation. This paper draws directly on the author’s experience as architect, archaeologist and owner of two companies specializing in Virtual Heritage, both of which routinely work with archaeologists, other historians, museums, schools, and governments to create vivid visualizations of past places and events.

While simply shaded massing models have given way to complexly lit and detailed virtual worlds, we nevertheless are still not where we should be in many aspects of our results, and how we do what we do is still a mystery to many. This paper touches on the following topics:

How archaeology has traditionally dealt with the evidence trail, with special focus on the use of images as documentation;

How digital archaeology has changed the rules and how the discipline is trying to cope;

How virtual heritage projects can solve many problems relating to data trails, allowing researchers to compare the evidence to the outcome, and to have virtual worlds become visual indexes to all the information, and thus more than pretty pictures of the past; and

How some of these issues have been handled in projects undertaken by the author’s two companies: Learning Sites and the Institute for the Visualization of History.